December 20, 2012

gun owners paragons of virtue

“I don’t want to shoot holes in pieces of paper, I want to watch a watermelon be destroyed,” said Mr. Mason, 23, an assistant manager at a yoga studio in Las Vegas. “It’s fun and it makes you smile but it’s a skill, its own art form,” he said. “I don’t want to make it sound weird, but it’s almost like holding a live animal. You’ve fired the thing, and it’s kicked around, and there’s the smell.”

Mr. Mason does not hunt and does not consider his shooting to be a sport. It gives him an electrical charge of excitement, he said. “When I put 20 rounds downrange, I’m like, man, I need a burger, yes!”

The Second Amendment, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm gonna leave this hear as an antidote to the gas station attendant in New Jersey who cursed out my wife over the weekend for wanting to take his guns away. My wife merited this by, when asked about Newtown being terrible, agreeing and offering that something must be done. And no, I wasn't there, so presumably-armed douchebag gets his jollies by screaming at lone women, which you'd hope would be a rare event until you spend more than five minutes on Facebook.

December 19, 2012

interview with sean howe

So I had one of that type of flu that actually forces one to lie in bed — 36 hours, in my case, and that was after two days of warning aches, and now I'm in the I-probably-should-take-a-cab-instead-of-walk stage.

So the past two days of news and anything else? I've no idea of it. Hopefully it was gun control something and edging away from the fiscal cliff, but it might as well have been aliens land in Berlin for all I'd know. My two days was the middle 700 pages of REAMDE and "Torchwood: Children of Earth".

Speaking of geeks, I did have a piece run on The Awl yesterday, my first full-length interview. I spoke to Sean Howe, the author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, mostly about how awesome it was that someone volunteered to spend the three years Howe spent researching this obsessive book. And don't let the "comic book" angle scare you off, as it's of interest to anyone curious about the intersection between pop culture and commerce and the history thereof.
Try it. Maybe you'll like it.